- Computational Linguistics (also called Natural Language Processing, abbreviated as NLP) is a field of vital importance in the information age. With growing amounts of speech and text data, the demand keeps increasing for automated tools to understand human language and NLP specialists to develop and operate these tools.
- In industry, Computational Linguistics techniques are being widely used in search engines, digital libraries, speech recognition systems, and data mining toolkits. The leading data analysis companies like SAS and SPSS all have added text analysis components to their products. Many open-source NLP toolkits have also been available. Companies with large amount of text data need NLP specialists to develop in-house tools or use off-the-shelf tools to analyze their corpora.